Watch the sky: Northern lights spark summer delights

Robert Snache, a photographer living in the Rama First Nation in Ontario, captured this view of the northern lights on the night of July 8-9. For more about Snache and his work, check out Spirithands Photography on Facebook.

A crack in the magnetic field sounds like the start of a sci-fi movie, but it's actually an opportunity for a beautiful auroral light show — as seen in these pictures.

SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips says the interplanetary magnetic field near Earth experienced a fluctuation last night and tipped south, opening a crack for electrically charged particles to interact with atoms and ions in the upper atmosphere. "Solar wind poured in and ignited the lights," he wrote.

The result was a five-star performance, staged for skywatchers in northern latitudes. "I had gone out to search for noctilucent clouds, but instead I found a super-clear night with northern lights," photographer Robert Snache of Ontario's Rama First Nation wrote.

Snache told me that he's the guy in the foreground of the picture, which was "shot with a 10-second timer." For more of Snache's work, check out Spirithands Photography on the Web, Facebook or Flickr.

South of the U.S.-Canada border, Shawn Stockman-Malone of Lake Superior Photo also got a great view of the northern lights from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We've featured Stockman-Malone's time-lapse videos before, but this one is different in at least two respects. First, the pace of the video is slower, which is "more realistic to what you might see with the aurora" in real time, he said. And if you click the video to full-screen resolution, you'll notice a dark shape flitting through the start of the scene. That's a great blue heron, Stockman-Malone said.

"Scared the heck when I saw it flying around just barely over the lake," he told me an email. "All I saw was a big black blob, thought maybe it was a goose. I didn't see it on the shore until I put the lapse together. I must have spooked it when I went walking around looking for other photo angles."

The auroral show could light up northern skies once again tonight: Space weather forecasters say that a strong wave of solar particles, blasted out from a sunspot region on Friday, could deal a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field overnight. "NOAA forecasters estimate a 25 percent to 30 percent chance of polar geomagnetic storms if and when the cloud arrives," SpaceWeather.com reports.